Several years ago, Brad Cordova was taking a left turn off of a major road on his way to the grocery store when a driver who was texting behind the wheel ran a red light and t-boned Cordova’s car, severing the car in half.
Though the outcome of the collision could have been far worse, Cordova temporarily lost his sight and still suffers from chronic headaches and periodic fogginess. 
By 2012, the accident was far from Cordova’s mind as he was finishing up his PhD in machine learning at MIT. Then he decided to take a class on entrepreneurism. Each student had to link up with a partner for a capstone project, and Cordova (pictured right) was introduced to classmate Joe Adelmann from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Over coffee, the pair discovered they had similar backgrounds and motivations.
“Both of our dads are truck drivers, both of our moms are teachers and we even have the same blood type,” Cordova said, laughing. “We really hit it off.”
Because of Cordova’s close call and both men’s experiences hearing their fathers discuss many near misses as truck drivers, Cordova and Adelmann found they had a shared mission to have a positive impact on safe driving through technology.
From this meeting, TrueMotion was born with the help of co-founders Scott Griffith and Jon McNeill.
TrueMotion’s platform marries data with technology, enabling insurance companies to distinguish between safe and risky drivers, and reward safe drivers with discounts on their insurance. How? TrueMotion’s safe driving app (available for Apple and Android smartphones) automatically detects when you’re driving and tells you how you’re doing with a 0 to 100 score.
The free app gives you a complete picture of your family's driving safety, telling you where your family members are and how they got there, providing details on exactly how they drove including phone use, texting, aggressive driving, speeding, hard braking and more.
TrueMotion generates revenue by selling its smartphone-based data collection and analysis software to some of the country's biggest auto insurers, including Progressive Corp. and two other top-10 insurance companies.
Cordova — now the company’s CTO — said the ultimate goal of TrueMotion is not just to track drivers, but to actually change their behavior. Every day in the United States, over 8 people are killed and 1,161 injured in crashes that are reported to involve a distracted driver, the CDC reports.
“We ran a big study with one of our customers and found that people who download the app reduced their distracted driving by 75 percent,” Cordova said.
TrueMotion’s goal is what attracts many of its employees, Cordova added. “I really dislike working with people who have big egos,” Cordova said, “So the culture here is people who are very humble and intelligent, but without big egos.”
Cordova was recently awarded Forbes’s “30 under 30” award, which receives 15,000+ nominations for just 600 spots, making Forbes 30 Under 30 harder to get into than Stanford or Harvard.
To date, TrueMotion has raised $13 million in funding and has grown to 42 employees.
Looking forward at 2017, Cordova has no plans of slowing down. “I want to be what ‘Mothers Against Drunk Driving’ was for drunk driving,” Cordova said. “That’s what we’re going to do for distracted driving.”
Photos via social media and Shutterstock
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